I am truly honoured that I will be awarded the 2015 Belmont Prize for Contemporary Music of the Forberg-Schneider Foundation!!!

The Belmont Prize honors innovation, daring, and courage, but nothing that prolongs the status quo. Innovations proceed from the arts; art patronage can only help to sustain them a few steps along the way. It is one of Europe’s highest endowed awards for artistic creation.

Great musicians, powerful music and lot of wonderful friends is what you should expect if you come there and I would be thrilled if you share this special day with me!

Programme:

Mislio bi čovek: zvezde (… one would think: stars) for Accordion soloManje te u majke groze (One Less Horror for Your Mother) for Soprano, Bass Clarinet, Accordion, Violin, Viola and CelloAnselm Cybinski (music critic) in conversation with the laureate Milica DjordjevićI ti hoćeš da se volimo (So you want us to love each other) for Soprano and Accordion (world premiere, dedicated to Gabriele Forberg-Schneider)The Death of the Star-Knower, petrified echoes of an epitaph in a kicked crystal of time I & II, for String Quartet

This remarkable prize is being awarded for the third time in Hitzacker. In 2004 it was presented to Carolin Widmann, the festival’s current artistic director, in 2009 it went to the pianist and conductor Marino Formenti. The Forberg-Schneider Foundation’s 2015 Belmont Prize for Contemporary Music is being awarded, along with it's 20,000 € cash endowment, to the young Serbian composer Milica Djordjević. She will be introduced through several of her chamber music works, two of which were inspired by the Serbian poet Vasko Popa. The critic Anselm Cybinski will delve into her unusual background with her. A special highlight of this concert is the world premiere of a work for voice and accordion. Chairman of the Foundation Board Gabriele Forberg-Schneider, to whom the premiered work is dedicated, will present the prize to the laureate.